Man in the Arena

There is a scene in the movie Gladiator wherein they await entrance to the arena for fatal combat.

Maximus is not perturbed while others piss themselves or pray.

Each morning when you recite the mnemonic visualize the worst the day might offer.

And then recall that scene.

The Martial Artist

Nothing in this, or any other book will do you any good, if you can’t do this one exercise. And if you strengthen yourself with it, all the rest can follow. 

This exercise only takes a few seconds, but it will strengthen your free will, and at the same time give you a vantage point with which to regard your mind and emotions. Part of being the man in the Arena, is to be able to detach from your emotions and objectify them, and this exercise will help you with that. All it takes is a radio.

Ronin

Ronin, What is the self-image you feed, and that controls you?

Using life as a training ground to develop the value of a martial artist means you are to some extent a new person in need of a new self-image that will be a source of power.

As you recite the mnemonic and come to “Ronin,” you change your posture and visualize your avatar.

It would seem that this shouldn’t be such a difficult task, but it is very hard. The reason is that your posture represents your assumed role in life and 

1-eye

1eye, How do you use spirituality, intuition, and creativity? It is now that we build your “super power.” 

With a moments thought you can realize that there is no linguistic process that leads to genius or incredible performance. Otherwise computers would generate all the inventions we might imagine, and there would be simple handbooks for brilliant basketball playing. To do this you must access the Void, and this is how you practice. 1eye  

While reciting the mnemonic close one eye, open it, and close the other. The natural tendency is to focus on what the open-eye sees. Don’t. Focus on the Void of the closed eye.

Laughing Pirate

Laughing Pirate invokes the spirit, of total uninhibited commitment. The will to go for it, and play a game with life that has no score, simply for the pleasure of playing. This is striking from the Void. It is like having an Olympic performance and not knowing what you did. Laughing pirate is a feeling and attitude that you summon with your smile.

and Seeking Beauty

Once you develop the ability to create art, by the way you perceive, you are something like a man who can shit gold coins. If you had such wondrous bowl movements, you would certainly want to exercise this talent constantly, and the same is true for creating beauty. Actually, the ability to create and enjoy beauty is better than the ability to make money. The beauty registers with a deep part of you, it expresses who and what you are, and has to do intimately with life. A person with a deep sense of beauty should be happy and have a good sense of who he is. Thus, the making of beauty is very close, in its own way, to meaning and purpose.

In a Strange Land

“For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.”― Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan